The disclosed embodiments relate to a computer implemented recommender system/method which enables the computer to provide more “emotionally” relevant/connected, and therefore more likely to be successful, recommendations while minimizing dependency on historical data as well susceptibility to bias, e.g. monetary and/or sponsor based. The disclosed embodiments segment a target set of known users into groups based on similar characteristics and then associate each group with one or more unique sets of affinities derived from the social media interactions of a general population having similar affinities. Similarly, a unique set of affinity characteristics is derived, and stored in a data structure, for each of a set of recommendations. The unique sets of affinities associated with the groups are compared with the set of affinity characteristics associated with each recommendations to derive a subset thereof relevant to the users of the particular group.